RTSP vs. HTTP Streaming

Your decision about whether to use HTTP or RTSP streaming may be determined simply by whether you have access to a QuickTime streaming server—a requirement for RTSP streaming (see the sidebar “QuickTime RTSP Streaming Servers”). Even if you have access to a QuickTime streaming server, however, you need to consider other factors.

Reasons to use HTTP streaming

One advantage of HTTP streaming is that if the viewer wants to replay the data, that data doesn’t need to be served over the network again; it’s already on the user’s hard disk. By contrast, with RTSP streaming, the data needs to be served over the network again if the viewer wants to replay the movie.